Marand advocates open health data at meeting with EU Vice President Neelie Kroes

Marand CEO Tomaz Gornik attended lunch with Neelie Kroes, European Commission Vice President responsible for the Digital Agenda Europe on Monday, May 12th at eHealth Forum 2014 in Athens, Greece.

The purpose of the meeting was for innovative SMEs to provide feedback to Mrs. Kroes about current and future EU eHealth initiatives. Several topics were discussed including innovation, open data, SME funding, mHealth, European Innovation Partnership and Horizon 2020.

“In order to achieve lifelong health records, data must become open, independent of the applications. Some public health systems are already realising the need to define and control health data while the vendors compete on application functionality, not data model lock-in. At the meeting with Mrs. Kroes, I expressed the need for support from the EU in defining the clinical data models necessary to store health data. Since there has not been a coordinated effort to do that in scale, many EU funded projects have been reinventing the wheel. Modeling health data should be led by the clinical community thus forming a bridge between it and ICT. Having a repository of health data models available in open-source would level the playing field and let EU SME companies provide solutions that compete with the big vendors, while providing EU members a foundation to move eHealth forward at a much faster pace while at the same time ensuring cross-border interoperability.” said Mr. Tomaz Gornik, Marand CEO.

A follow up meeting was scheduled for September in Brussels. The meeting was also attended by Mr. Paul Timmers, Director Sustainable & Secure Society, and Mr. Ilias Iakovidis, Acting Head of Unit, Digital Social Platforms, both DG CONNECT at European Commission.